Educators Supporting Educators

Educators Supporting Educators: A Guide to Organizing School Support TeamsEducators Supporting Educators: A Guide to Organizing School Support Teams

by Joseph Johnson (Author), Cerylle Moffett (Author), Margery Ginsberg (Author)

Amazon

How can educators best work to improve teaching and learning for all students? The authors of Educators Supporting Educators: A Guide to Organizing School Support Teams say the key is to embrace a schoolwide approach to change that gives teachers and administrators the opportunity to imagine what might work best for their own students in their own school–with the assistance of external facilitators known as “school support teams.”

School support teams are composed of skilled teachers and administrators, pupil services administrators, pupil services personnel, and distinguished educators from K-12 and postsecondary education who have had experience with successful school improvement initiatives. Team members act as mentors or coaches, assisting schools in planning and implementing school improvement efforts such as

    • reconfiguring the school day,
    • increasing collaboration among teachers,
    • studying new ideas about teaching and learning,
    • controlling school resources,
    • combining federal funds to initiate innovative practices, and
    • finding ways for the school to be released from unnecessarily restrictive mandates regarding student grouping, minutes of instruction, and detailed curriculum sequences.

Drawing on their experience in providing training to more than 2,000 members of school support teams over a three-year period, the authors provide practical advice on how to develop a pool of potential team members, organize a system of school support teams, coordinate teams with schools, maintain communication with teams and team leaders, and support the success of the initiative. They illustrate the concept with a case study describing how the school support team works in a school.

The authors also discuss in detail how to design training programs for school support team members. The book includes suggested agendas for training sessions, detailed descriptions of field-tested training activities, and numerous handouts and blackline transparency masters for use in training sessions.

Educators Supporting Educators is designed as a resource for educators in any setting–a school, a district, a regional service center or educational cooperative, a state education agency, or an institution of higher learning. Readers will find everything they need to make school support teams an invaluable element of their education program.